Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Laptop purchase help , please.
First let me just say thank you so much in the past for helping me build or upgrade pc’s years ago. I haven’t kept up or really used a pc of any sort minus an ipad for years. The build and upgrades i had help with here were absolutely amazing. I just dont game anymore.
That said.
PURPOSE: Step daughter would like a laptop for personal use. As well as to do some sort of presentations at convention panels. As far as specifics i have no idea what that involves. She has gotten her masters and is a librarian as well. Heads youth programs at her library pretty often. Ive asked questions about everything and the responses are aggravating when trying to buy something for her, because of expense. She is frugal. Librarians dont make much vs. the amount spent for education early on. This is my last resort at trying to buy her something as a surprise. I tried figuring out what kind of nice jewelry she likes. FAIL. Her reply is costume jewelry.
price: $300- $600 ? I just dont know. $1k at most. I just dont have any idea of performance gaps vs price range. Most modern features would be nice. Which i have no idea what they are. But ultimately best performance per value is the goal. In the end even if lacks some more modern features.
Quizzical if you are still around and on the forums could you please help me.
PURPOSE: Step daughter would like a laptop for personal use. As well as to do some sort of presentations at convention panels. As far as specifics i have no idea what that involves. She has gotten her masters and is a librarian as well. Heads youth programs at her library pretty often. Ive asked questions about everything and the responses are aggravating when trying to buy something for her, because of expense. She is frugal. Librarians dont make much vs. the amount spent for education early on. This is my last resort at trying to buy her something as a surprise. I tried figuring out what kind of nice jewelry she likes. FAIL. Her reply is costume jewelry.
price: $300- $600 ? I just dont know. $1k at most. I just dont have any idea of performance gaps vs price range. Most modern features would be nice. Which i have no idea what they are. But ultimately best performance per value is the goal. In the end even if lacks some more modern features.
Quizzical if you are still around and on the forums could you please help me.
Comments
https://biturl.top/rU7bY3
Beyond the shadows there's always light
By the sound of it, hulluck's stepdaughter might not be right target audience?
https://www.newegg.com/pure-silver-acer-aspire-5-a515-45-r2b5-mainstream/p/N82E16834360041
But I'm not from USA and can't really look for good US laptop offers. Quizzical is likely able to find a better one.
Be aware that no laptop on the $300 - 600 price range is good for running games. They'll be able to run simple games, but to run all the modern AAA games you'd need to spend much more money.
However if you're willing to spend something like $500 - $600, a lot of laptops at that price range are already good for working, browsing web, and such, and have good battery life.
i do apologize for the rambling. I am wound up over it.
i go into a store and i can pick out 50 things to add to a lwish list. Gun store, lowes, harbor freight, Melt debit cards. She is not like that at all.
You should definitely get her an IPS monitor if she's going to use it much. Especially on a laptop, where the vertical viewing angles often aren't ideal, that will look a lot better than a TN monitor.
You should also definitely get her an SSD. Now that small SSDs don't necessarily cost any more than small hard drives, there's really no good reason not to get an SSD unless you need enormous storage capacity on a very small budget.
The best CPUs available for laptops these days are probably the Ryzen Mobile 5000 series parts, and Intel's Tiger Lake parts are probably next best. You can get older parts if you're trying to save money, but I'd stay away from Intel Atom cores or some old AMD Excavator cores unless you're on a severe budget.
Unless she's going to play demanding games (as opposed to undemanding games like Solitaire) or do something else that pushes a GPU hard (which is uncommon apart from cryptocurrency mining), I'd go with an integrated GPU. That will save money, weight, heat, power, and potential driver issues when it tries to turn a discrete card off and on.
If you're in the US, you're probably not going to find a better option than the one Vrika linked. That checks all the boxes listed above, and for a modest price tag of $550.
The one flaw in that laptop is the memory configuration. It comes with 8 GB, while leaving a memory channel unused. Fortunately, that's easy to fix yourself, and not even all that expensive to do so:
https://www.newegg.com/acer-8gb-260-pin-ddr4-so-dimm/p/N82E16820247076
If you do want to upgrade the memory, then you'd definitely want an 8 GB module to match the 8 GB that the laptop already comes with. I don't know what the clock speed and timings of the onboard memory that the laptop comes with are, but it's likely that that module will match it, or at least be compatible with the Acer laptop that Vrika linked.
Memory modules from more traditional memory vendors such as G.Skill or Corsair cost about the same as that one, too.
Even with the memory upgrade, you'd get her a very nice laptop for under $600. You can spend a lot less than that on a laptop, but the laptop you get on a $400 budget won't be nearly as good. A lot depends on what you're willing to spend. Considering what you can get for $600, I wouldn't spend more than that on a laptop unless your daughter has unusual needs that drive the price up.
I have a 14" M1 MBP - but I'd strongly recommend the Air. The only difference between the $1500 MBP I bought and a $900 Air (which can probably be found for less if you look or can get an academic discount) is basically a cooling fan which never comes on anyway. My M1 Macbook is hands down the best laptop I've ever used.
Now, that's on the upper end of your budget, I admit. But I'd consider a few things
Every Apple Laptop that I've owned, and it's been a handful, have had very long and useful lives. My 2001 Macbook still runs fine, as a matter of fact, and I've only had to retire one because it stopped working, after 8 years (battery swelled). So with respect to longevity, you aren't going to find much better, especially <$1,000.
Macbooks have resale value, even at several years old. A budget laptop from Dell is not.
For the tools that your stepdaughter is looking at doing - Apple excels at. Presentations it can do just fine, a lot of places have Apple TV just for wireless streaming / casting, and it will work with a various host of third party services, or plain old HDMI if your stuck with a cable. And drawing, photo touchups, slide shows, presentations, video editing, web browsing - there is no better device for content creation, bar none.
Even casual gaming is perfectly fine, the M1 can hang with some lower end discrete graphics - although the selection will be a bit more limited than on a Windows machine.
Apple support, and AppleCare if you chose to use it - is the best thing out there. They will schedule a sit down one-on-one training session with you to learn how to use everything if you want them to. I won't say Apple is immune to ever needing to be repaired, but the process is much less painful than, say, Dell consumer service.
And the new M1 architecture - it is amazing. It puts almost everything on the PC side to shame, unless you spend a lot of money. My M1 I can get through two or three ~days~ of full time office work (Excel, Word, email, web) on a battery charge. I've never seen that before on any kind of device, not even close.
You don't need to crank the memory for OS X, base specs will run perfectly acceptably for most things. Sure, it may not have as much RAM as a PC for less money, but I'd say that matters less than a lot of the other things you'd be getting with it.
Now, I will give you, you have to run OS X to do it, but for the stuff it looks like your daughter will be doing, I don't think that's a big drawback - Apple has all that kind of stuff in spades.
So yeah, it would be at the top end of your budget. But it would be inside your budget, and I would make a strong case that you could not find a better investment for your money right now.
I think you'd be doing yourself and your step daughter a disservice if you didn't at least go and look at one and let her see a Macbook Air at either an Apple Store or Best Buy before you make a decision.
If she's currently using PC then it's best to get another PC so that she can keep using all of her familiar programs. Whereas if she's currently using Apple, then imho it's best to get another Apple.
A particular anime creating title may be among those, I don't know.
But most all the popular titles and systems/services that have broad appeal are already cross platform and/or cloud based, and a good number of the smaller programs fill the gaps to provide similar/identical services on alternate platforms where the bigger names haven't provided support.
i order the one vrika posted with the additional ram. That said shes weird. I mean car shopping with her was exhausting. We were going to buy her whatever she wanted within about a $40k range. We found a lot , as ya’ll know or don’t, car lots are empty. I spent weeks online trying to find stuff she would like to go look at and in stock.
if for some reason she doesnt like this one ill send it back and check out the apple. She always looks at price first. I get it. But then again i dont. She just finished college after getting her masters to be a librarian. Entry pay at a public library is absolute crud but they require a masters and even then some depending on if its a public library or a school library.
When she gets this laptop if she doesnt like it. That might get her to communicating more on what she does want. Its nice to see some names from the past. I thank ya’ll so much truly. Because while i finally figured out a surprise to get her. Granted its not upper end but we just bought her a car a few months back. Its something that she needs. Ya’ll are absolutely awesome. Thank you so much and ill keep ya posted after christmas. I paid for it to be here in time but we will see.
ridelyn thanks for the suggestion! Ill wrap them both and let her choose and return the other. but i bet , hope she goes for the apple. Its nicer for what shes doing i bet. Or maybe i wont give her a choice? Just give her the apple so she cant reject it.
As far as giving her a choice - I will leave that up to you
Apple has a reputation as a premium priced product, and I won't say it's entirely undeserved.
I always get scoffed at by our IT department when I request Apple stuff, but then I remind them, I've only had 3 laptops issued to me by the IT department, and I've worked here for 15 years. The only time I ever call IT is if I have a problem with their cloud services. I've never had a ticket on hardware. The rest of the company goes through a laptop every 2-3 years and they have to keep a small fleet of loaner Dells and Surfaces to keep up with hardware issues.
Maybe the surface pro lines might have more issues but that hasn't been my experience.
Granted if I was looking to play games I could have gotten an amazing gaming laptop for a little cheaper, but that really wasn't what this purchase was about.
Way out of the price range for this conversation but still.
Now those same folks talk about what a nightmare the M1 is, because it doesn't run x86 Windows. And that's true, it can't run x86 Windows, it was never advertised as being able to. But it can run ARM Windows...